Roy Harper's thoughts about life in general…

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Monthly Archives: December 2008

A review of Stormcock appeared in Rock’nReel Magazine some months ago. Someone said that it was good, so it slid under the radar for a couple of months. When I eventually got the time to check it, I discovered that in some ways it resembled the rubbish that used to be written about me when I was regularly in the charts, and almost always by people who “Couldn’t really be bothered”. It was typically a lazy and condescending review, which in the end tried to award the album three stars due solely to the participation of other people involved on it. Without addressing the real meanings of what the lyric was really saying in the context of when it was written. Bad form. The fact that doesn’t escape me is that this can be described as representative of ‘the majority mind’. And always was. A logical and genuine question that always follows this is, “Is the majority mind right?” This can be answered in a couple of ways.

One, ‘the majority mind’ will in any case be the one that carries us through to our destiny, regardless of ethic, morality or fate. It can obviously be inferred therefore that the ‘majority mind’ is the consistent denominator in human affaires, and from there it can easily be argued that the ‘majority mind’ is the only possible direction for humanity.

Or 2. How difficult is it to alter the established direction of the ‘majority mind’, given that it was first suggested, for instance, that child labour be abolished more than 200 years ago?

The essay below is based on a combination of what I was thinking when I wrote the ‘Stormcock’ album, which was released in early 1971, and my thoughts about it over four decades later.

The conditions in which the thoughts for the inspirations occurred are largely the same in 2008. Certainly my state of mind, and particularly with regard to the subject matter, has only altered in that the experiences that garnered these compositions has been further reinforced. This piece is all about the kinds of ‘state of mind’ I had long before the album was thought about, that were automatically being built into a progression of prosodic statements I was committing to vinyl. Mental attitudes to the same kinds of questions I still find myself asking today, decades later. I find that very little has changed over the years since 1969 and that I still regard the content of the album as being wholly relevant to the 21st Century.

The subjects of the album; the human species, it’s state, it’s church and it’s law have changed very little in the intervening years. I still regard the church, the state and a lot of it’s laws as fundamental enemies of the species. In most instances the state has inevitably become even more systemized than it was at the time, and those systems have now really come into their own as mazes of monolithic obstacles to coherence. For the last few thousand years, the state has always been a necessarily speculative projection of what it might take to keep ourselves in some kind of order, but it’s never actually been accurate enough in either it’s aims or it’s collective means to accomplish the kind of order that has any hope of satisfying the progressive requirements of it’s citizenry. Order, however, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. For some of us, the state, it’s proclivities, religions, leaders, messages, and intent are all. For others among us it now represents little more than a gigantic cipher of failed intention. An incredible morass of truncated ‘fast food’ wisdoms doled out to billions of Orwellian proles by thousands of con-masters. At best, a stuttering host of temporary solutions to obvious and permanent problems of community. Bandages for heart disease.